Bruno Alexandre
Carin Geada / Igor C. Silva
Jan Wierzba & Trash Panda Collective

Strange Smoke Over My Skin is a multimedia choregraphed performance that explores the dynamics of power and silenced bodies in political spaces. Sound, body movement, light and shade are sculpted together in a multi-sensorial project where a dense and immersive audio-visual environment transports the audience to a distant virtual reality. Perception is manipulated and subverted in a constant flux, in which the sound and visual environment manipulates the spectators’ perception, transporting them to a place where their bodies are emancipated between the real and the virtual. Based on social and musical representations, the conductor is portrayed as a figure of power, whose authority is recognised and commonly accepted. However, in a traditional context, the conductor is the only figure on the stage who has the freedom to express the music through the movement of his or her body and, at the same time, is also the only person whose movement has no immediate representation in sound. In this performance, the aim is to deconstruct these dynamics of power, exposing the performers to various means for translating into sound and image the different artistic expressions that each individual on stage possesses, thus creating a new political space – where new dynamics of power emerge, or are totally deconstructed, increasing the power of individuality and difference. The conductor becomes just another member of the cast through this process of deconstruction; the performers are freed from the figure of central power, depolarising the relationship of co-existence. A new singular and creative territory emerges as soon as the figure of the conductor is defragmented into the reality of both being in control and being a controlled figure. Social balance, as we know it, is disintegrated and the urgency in finding new configurations draws us into a non-existent empty space, which we rummage around hastily. Invisibility is inevitable.